Some student feedback

I’ve been asking students to give me feedback about using the actual powtoons (the activity) and also what they learned from it.

On the whole they enjoyed using powtoon. Comments included that it was fun and interesting, and that they would like to use them in different subjects that they do at university. They enjoyed the animations and some students said it was quite user friendly. On the other hand, some students felt it was a little bit difficult to use, but this was partly because they only had an hour or so produce the video from scratch.

Positive comments about what they had learned was that it was re-enforcing what they knew they had to do in the presentations. I can see some improvement – in a sense what I am aiming for is that simple things become almost automatic for the students so that they don’t have to think about them. Then they can concentrate on the content of their presentation. We are not there yet, but I can see progress.

One comment was that the animation in the videos can be distracting, and can mean that the message is lost. This is a good point, and we always need to balance between making something attractive, but also getting the message across.